• Good small Android tablets are thin on the ground.  So how about a $60 6.5" phone?  (AnandTech)
  
  Well, it's only a 1200x540 screen, a quad core 1.3GHz A53, 2GB RAM, and 16GB or 32GB of storage, plus a microSD slot.  And three rear cameras plus a front camera in a teardrop notch.  Android 10 and...  Stuff.
  
  
  
• Crucial has released the P5, a new TLC PCIe 3.0 NVMe M.2 SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Capacities up to 2TB, speeds up to 3400MB/s on reads, 3000MB/s on writes, which is about as fast as you get on PCIe 3.0.
  
  
  
• Australia may be working towards right-to-repair legislation.  (TechDirt)
  
  Even while it is busy trashing the right to link.
  
  
  
• I thought for a moment that dropping the Staten Island groundhog was local vernacular.  (TechDirt)
  
  New York, New York, it's a wonderful town.
  
  
  
• AMD just kicked Intel in the nuts if they have any.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The third-generation Ryzen 3 parts are out, both 4 core / 8 thread parts that look set to kill the more expensive and as yet unreleased 10th generation Core i3.
  
  
  
• The fossa has focalised.  (Ubuntu)
  
  Ubuntu 20.04, that is.
  
  Don't touch it until July.
  
  
  
• How does it perform, you ask?  (Phoronix)
  
  An average of 20% faster than Blistered Binturong over 200 benchmarks on a 36-core Xeon system.  That's with a new version of GCC as well as the new kernel and everything else.
  
  
  
• A look at the cheapest, lowest endest Epyc processor.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The 7252 is an 8 core processor - four CPU dies with only one active core per CCX.
  
  I wonder if AMD will create more variants with Zen 3, which has a single block of eight cores per die instead of two four core CCXes.  They could probably do any number from 1 to 64 cores right now, but odd distributions would make load balancing tricky.
  
  
  
• Apple is planning a 12-core Arm-based Mac of some sort for next year unless they aren't.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Or possibly a Greek salad.
  
  
  
• SpaceX has launched another flotilla of satellites.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  They are already the largest satellite operator in the world and the gap is growing rapidly.
  
  
  
• Coles fixed their online checkout thingy.  Only now they're out of their great gluten free chickie nuggies.  They have a dozen different gultenated varieties in stock, of course.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 24 2020 04:50 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Australia had only four new cases of Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague overnight.  Yeah, not deaths, cases.  And testing is fairly widespread now.
  
  Things are so good that Coles has reopened home delivery.  (ZDNet)
  
  Shame that their website WON'T ACTUALLY LET YOU CHECK OUT.
  
  (Despite what the article says, Woolworths has been taking home deliveries throughout the plague.  They have added third-party deliveries as an option though.)
  
  
  
• Need a 32-core Arm development system?  (AnandTech)
  
  Me neither.  When I saw the headline I was hoping for for a look at those new 80 core parts that can actually compete on some tasks with a 64 core Epyc, but this is the previous generation.
  
  
  
• Razer has two new 13" Blade Stealth models.  (AnandTech)
  
  They couple the Intel Core i7-1065G7 - a 25W 4-core part - with an Nvidia GTX 1650 in a sleek case with a 60Hz 4K or 120Hz 1080p display and no dedicated PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys.
  
  No, I don't know why either.
  
  
  
• Gigabyte's Z490 motherboards are ready for PCIe 4.0.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Shame about Intel.  They'll get around to that eventually.  Maybe next year.
  
  
  
• Everything not mandatory is forbidden.  Everything not forbidden is mandatory.
  
  Except for things that are both.  (TechDirt)
  
  New York, New York, it's a wonderful town.  The mayor is a commie and the governor's a clown.
  
  
  
• Things Jaana wishes developers knew about databases.  (Medium)
  
  With many developers I'd settle for You can't get something out of the database unless you put it in there first.
  
  Oh, and Don't use a search query when you know the primary key.
  
  
  
• Stripe is watching everything you do.  (MTLynch.io)
  
  The recommended procedure for using Stripe is to include their JavaScript on every page in your site, even ones that don't have anything to do with payment processing.
  
  This is of course retarded.
  
  The reason for this is apparently that it makes CAPTCHAs less necessary and more reliable.
  
  This is of course retarded.
  
  If you follow this recommendation, Stripe tracks everything every visitor to your site does.
  
  This is, of course, retarded.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 23 2020 04:06 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, April 23 2020 04:49 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, April 23 2020 09:02 AM (cTMj+)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, April 23 2020 10:33 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Ed Herint at Thursday, April 23 2020 11:23 PM (yKa6S)

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• A look at an ATX EPYC motherboard.  (AnandTech)
  
  It only has dual 10GbE, eight DIMM slots and 88 available PCIe lanes plus two M.2 NVMe slots, but...  Actually that's rather a lot.
  
  The version reviewed is PCIe 3.0 but there's an updated model out now.
  
  
  
• LG's new phone is named Vervet, like the monkeys.  (AnandTech)
  
  I think.
  
  And it has a headphone jack.
  
  
  
• Remind me not to invest in Merus Capital.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  For the three weeks it survives.
  
  
  
• Buying a barrel of crude oil.  (Bloomberg)
  
  Well, not me personally.
  
  On the other hand.
  
  
  
• The last release of the last good version of Python is here.  (ZDNet)
  
  The Python project appears to now be run by idiots:

  There were large changes midway through Python 2.7's life, such as PEP 466's feature backports to the ssl module and hash randomization.

  Hash randomization.  And an updated version of SSL.
  
  Anyway, PyPy will support Python 2.7 indefinitely, because it's a Python 2.7 compiler written in Python 2.7.  (It also supports 3.6 and shortly 3.7.)
  
  
  
• The right of the people peacably to assemble and petition the government ah fuck it.  (Vice)
  
  Of course the First Amendment only applies to the government, but the abject willingness of social networks to roll over for fascism is a reminder of how everything bad in human history came to be, from the Toba supereruption to NPM.
  
  
  
• Will comic books survive coronavirus is the wrong question.  (The Guardian)
  
  Comic books have been dead for years.  The industry would have folded up by 2010 if it hadn't been single-handedly rescued by Robert Downey Jr's performance in Iron Man.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 22 2020 12:20 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 22 2020 12:33 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, April 22 2020 08:50 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, April 22 2020 12:08 PM (Iwkd4)

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• OrbitDB is a distributed database for the peer-to-peer web or something like that.  (GitHub)
  
  It's written in Node.js and uses IPFS for storage, which makes it the stupidest idea since they built the original Hoover Dam out of candy floss.
  
  
  
• We're living through Connie Willis's Remake.  (The Verge)
  
  And also Doomsday Book.
  
  
  
• Australia has come down with a severe case of France.  (New Zealand Herald)
  
  This will be amusing.
  
  
  
• Online services are struggling to find a way to filter content after sending their staff home.  (AP News)
  
  They're not very bright, are they.
  
  
  
• Spider goat, spider goat, whatever happened to spider goat?  (AG Funder News)
  
  Well, the company went broke and the goats are probably dead, so not a lot.
  
  
  
• 700 malicious Ruby gems have been found and removed from rubygems.org.  (The Hacker News which is not the same as Hacker News, which is not at all ironic)
  
  These days I twitch every time I install a new Python package.
  
  
  
• A zero-day exploit for Zoom is being sold for $500,000.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  That's what they're asking for anyway.  Top bid is currently fourteen zlotys.  Not the current ones, either, the pre-1990 communist-era ones.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 21 2020 12:12 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 21 2020 12:13 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 21 2020 12:14 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Avatar at Tuesday, April 21 2020 04:14 AM (v29Tn)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 21 2020 05:39 AM (Iwkd4)

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Tech News

• Most of the Ryzen 4000 laptops announced so far have used H and HS series chips - 45 and 35W parts.  The new Zenbook 14 uses the 15W 8 core Ryzen 4700U.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It pairs the chip with 16GB of LPDDR4X RAM at 4266MHz, which should unlock the power of the integrated graphics....  And also has an Nvidia MX350 with 2GB of 7GHz GDDR5 on a 64-bit bus.  Which means that the dedicated graphics actually have less memory bandwidth than the integrated graphics, which has to be first.
  
  Specs for the rest of the laptop have yet to be announced.  Or leak, whichever.
  
  
  
• A look at a fake Intel quad 10GbE network card.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Apart from not actually being built by Intel, it works perfectly.
  
  
  
• How will tech hubs weather the pandemic?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  With any luck by sinking into the ocean, never to be heard from again.
  
  
  
• A look inside AMD's Am2901 bit-slice CPU.  (Righto)
  
  Back before you could fit 300 million transisters into a single square millimetre, you might have only been able to build a 4-bit CPU at a reasonable price.  The Am2901 was a 4-bit CPU.  But if you wired two of them together, it became an eight-bit CPU, and if you wired eight of them together you had yourself a 32-bit CPU, albeit a rather slow one because of the external carry propagation.
  
  Despite that - and the complexity of building a real-world 32-bit CPU out of MSI parts - it saw adoption in many places where a full custom design was too expensive and standard logic too bulky: The famous Xerox Star workstation, computers onboard the F16C/D, and later models of the VAX-11 before the introduction of the VLSI-based MicroVAX.

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, April 20 2020 04:07 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, April 20 2020 08:39 PM (PiXy!)

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• Surviving traces of dinosaur proteins and DNA may have been found in a fossil.  (Scientific American)
  
  According to - oh.  According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  So they'll probably make soup out of it.
  
  
  
• The SpaceX Crew Dragon is due for launch next month.  (CNet)
  
  Which is good timing because the Soyuz program has caught Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague.  (Space.com)
  
  
  
• Writing Python in Rust.  (m-ou.se)
  
  I'm not sure this is so much a practical solution as a reductio ad absurdum examination of Rust's macro facilities.
  
  
  
• TSMC's 3nm node will deliver a 70% higher transistor density than 5nm.  (WikiChip)
  
  Nearly 300 million per mm2 which is more than ten times as much as 16nm which I seem to recall was current up to about a week ago.
  
  Compared to 5nm they expect a 10-15% speed increase at constant power or a 25-30% power decrease at constant speed, which is similar to the gains of 5nm over 7nm.
  
  Meanwhile 5nm has entered volume production and 6nm - an upgrade path for existing 7nm designs - is on track for this year.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, April 19 2020 02:11 AM (obo9H)

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• Wuhan increased its bat soup death toll by 50%.  (New York Times)
  
  And that's their final offer.
  
  
  
• Western Digital isn't the only one with the shingles.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Turns out everyone's doing it.  Literally everyone who still makes hard drives, which means Seagate and Toshiba.
  
  
  
• Building your own ZFS-based NAS.  (Serve the Home)
  
  In case you don't have Synology units landing randomly on your doorstep.
  
  
  
• Apple's HomePod is still widely misunderstood.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Clearly it's a pod that contains a home.
  
  [At this juncture your intrepid reporter attempted to find a clip of Bulma using her pods and instead discovered that YouTube is full of horrible perverts.]
  
  
  
  
  
• Woolworths promises I'll get my lamingtons today.  What else did I order?  Hmm.  Brioche, carrot cake, peanut butter, iced tea, chicken tenders, Pepsi Max, vanilla and pomegranate cleaning spray....  Sounds like a party.
  
  Update: And they forgot all the frozen items.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, April 19 2020 12:44 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, April 20 2020 10:40 AM (PiXy!)

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Posted by: Shirt at Wednesday, March 01 2023 02:38 AM (Mifq7)

Posted by: Olympia Autoworks at Thursday, March 02 2023 02:20 AM (Mifq7)

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• Apple has announced the iPhone SE starting at $399.  (AnandTech)
  
  It has the same A13 chip that powers the $1099 iPhone 11 Max Pro, but less of everything else.  Except the storage - the base models both have 64GB.
  
  So if you want a phone that just does its job, does it quickly, and will be supported for more than 18 months, without paying upwards of a grand, it's a pretty good choice.
  
  
  
• A look inside Intel's NUC9VXQNX.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is Intel's Xeon workstation passive backplane supersized NUC. Despite being twice the size of the Mac Mini it has worse external I/O (two Thunderbolt ports vs. 4, and 1GbE vs. 10GbE) but it has room for an eight core Xeon, three M.2 SSDs, and an ITX-sized GPU.  Or, if you're so inclined - and Serve the Home were - a 25GbE card.
  
  Tom's Hardware tried it out with a Core i9-9900 in place of the Xeon, and an RTX 2070.
  
  
  
• China is breaking new ground in radical opacity with regards to Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague.  (TechDirt)
  
  Who, us?  Coronavirus research?  You must be thinking of someone else.
  
  
  
• Linux is getting patches for the onboard audio on TRX40 Threadripper motherboards.  (Phoronix)
  
  I guess someone out there is using that combination of things, though I can't imagine why.
  
  
  
• Well, that seems pretty nice.  (AnandTech)
  
  HP announced the 2020 Envy 13 and 15 models.
  
  The 13 has up to a Core i7-1065G7, Nvidia MX330 graphics, a 4K screen, and a 19.5 hour battery life.  Possibly not all at the same time.
  
  The 15 has up to a Core i9, RTX 2060 Max-Q, 4K OLED display, 32GB RAM, and 2TB PCIe SSD.  And two Thunderbolt ports and a 16.5 hour battery life.
  
  Both feature fingerprint readers and separate PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys.
  
  Envy 13 starts at $999, Envy 15 at $1349.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 17 2020 01:04 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 17 2020 01:05 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, April 17 2020 01:21 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 17 2020 01:34 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 17 2020 03:55 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 17 2020 04:03 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, April 17 2020 08:53 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 17 2020 10:26 AM (Iwkd4)

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• Fuck Dropbox.
  
  Seriously, if your cloud storage solution requires me to worry about keeping offsite backups you are doing everything wrong.
  
  My plan was to map Dropbox onto a Synology shared folder that gets snapshotted regularly so I could instantly recover the next time it decided to randomly delete all my files.  Of course, Dropbox doesn't let you do that (there is a reason, but I don't care) and it's madness anyway.
  
  I might try Microsoft's storage - whatever it is they call it - since I'm already paying for it with my Office 365 subscription.
  
  
  
• AMD has released three new EPYC processors in the F series.  (Anandtech)
  
  These are large cache, high-frequency, low core count parts, up to a maximum of 24 cores.  They're a good alternative to the Threadrippers we just deployed at work if you're willing to lose a little clock speed (3.9GHz max instead of 4.5GHz) for more memory, more memory channels, more cache, and dual sockets.
  
  They also cost more, of course.
  
  Serve the Home has more.
  
  And so does Phoronix.
  
  
  
• Western Digital Red NAS drives between 2TB and 6TB have shingles.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's not necessarily fatal.  The real problem is that Western Digital didn't bother to mention that anywhere.
  
  SMR (shingled) drives behave weirdly during random writes, being bimodal.  They typically have a WAFL cache of 20GB or so, and random writes in that area are faster than any other mechanical drive, up to 2000 IOPS.  Outside that area though performance plummets to as little as 30 IOPS.
  
  It can also be a problem when replacing drives in RAID arrays - random writes can be so slow that the RAID controller (hardware or software) marks the new drive as failed and kicks it back out again.
  
  And RAID arrays are the entire target market for the Western Digital Red.
  
  
  
• Both Samsung and TSMC are delaying 3nm GAAFET mass production until 2022.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Considering that AMD has just blown Intel out of the water with 7nm parts, and 5nm production is already ramping up at TSMC, a six-month delay in the next generation after that is not the end of the world.
  
  
  
• GitHub is now free for private development.  (GitHub)
  
  If you need enterprise features or direct support you will still pay for that, but if you just want the standard GitHub features for private projects, that is now free.
  
  The Team plan, which includes a few extra features and more storage over the free plan, is now just $4 per user per month, which considering developer salaries is basically noise.
  
  
  
• Python is turning into Node.js.  (Fly, Crash, Raise Exception)
  
  Most of our code at work is still Python 2.7.  This blog is Python 2.6.  While Python has served me well for a long time, I am considering abandoning ship.
  
  
  
• regex2fat is a utility that converts regular expressions into FAT32 filesystems.  (GitHub)

  Q: NOOOOOOOOOOO!!! YOU CAN'T TURN A DFA INTO A FAT32 FILE SYSTEM!!!! YOU CAN'T JUST HAVE A DIRECTORY WITH MULTIPLE PARENTS!!! YOU ARE BREAKING THE ASSUMPTION OF LACK OF LOOPERINOS NOOOOOOOOO

  A: Haha OS-driven regex engine go brrrrr

  Do not try this at home.
  
  

• I think I may just have to learn COBOL.  (The Verge)
  
  I've used what, 25, maybe 30 other programming languages over the years; one more isn't going to break me.  And the job security can't be beat.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 16 2020 01:05 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 16 2020 01:08 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 16 2020 01:17 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, April 16 2020 02:02 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, April 16 2020 08:59 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 17 2020 01:00 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Friday, April 17 2020 01:12 AM (obo9H)

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